Review: Dead Girl Running by Christina Dodd

Title: Dead Girl Running

Author: Christina Dodd

Series: Cape Charade, #1

Published: April 2018, HQN

Format: Paperback, 368 pages

Source: Harlequin Publicity Team

Summary:

I have three confessions to make:
1. I’ve got the scar of gunshot on my forehead.
2. I don’t remember an entire year of my life.
3. My name is Kellen Adams…and that’s half a lie. 

Girl
running…from a year she can’t remember, from a husband she prays is
dead, from homelessness and fear. Tough, capable Kellen Adams takes a
job as assistant manager of a remote vacation resort on the North
Pacific Coast. There amid the towering storms and the lashing waves, she
hopes to find sanctuary. But when she discovers a woman’s dead and
mutilated body, she’s soon trying to keep her own secrets while
investigating first one murder…then another.

Now every guest
and employee is a suspect. Every friendly face a mask. Every kind word a
lie. Kellen’s driven to defend her job, her friends and the place she’s
come to call home. Yet she wonders–with the scar of a gunshot on her
forehead and amnesia that leaves her unsure of her own past–could the
killer be staring her in the face?

My thoughts: Christina Dodd is a new-to-me author. This book intrigued me and was part of a bookstagram campaign being held by the Harlequin Publicity Team. I’m always on the lookout for new authors and when I saw that not only did this book look good, but that it was the start of a new series, it just seemed like a homerun to me!

I loved the way this book opens up – it just pulls you into the story and for me, the book never really let up. It was intense and the suspense builds at a steady pace throughout the book until the ending. I found myself glued to the pages, desperate to figure out just what was going on – thinking I had it figured out, only to be thwarted as something new would be discovered. This one really kept me on my toes!

I really liked getting to know Kellen – she is complicated and has quite the backstory. I mean – a missing year – hello!?!? I always find the amnesia storyline to be so cool and I really do hope that in the upcoming book(s) this gets explored more because I really want/need to know what happened here. Kellen is a survivor for sure, yet what I really appreciated about this book is that we don’t get her full story all at once. It is ever so slowly given to us, and what we do find out about her is only part of the story – there is so much of her to uncover. There are many facets to Kellen and we have only scratched the surface.

We meet a lot of characters in this first book and while it was a bit confusing at first to keep everyone straight, I did like that way Kellen cataloged everyone in her brain – whenever I forgot who someone was, I would flip back to the data mine of their character to refresh my memory of who they were. This seemed to help until I could keep them straight. I’m not sure who is going to be continuing on in the next book as I don’t know if the setting will remain constant, but I sure do hope Kellen continues to do this trick moving forward.

Besides the mystery, we are left with quite a cliffhanger, leaving me desperate for the next book in this series! As much as I love reading series, I really do hate waiting for that next book, especially when it ends like this one does…this is why sometimes it’s better to wait to read series when all the books are out – then you can read them one right after another! What do you think? 

Books in this series:

1. Dead Girl Running
2. What Doesn’t Kill Me – due out Feb 2019